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Without the right to communicate and democratisation of communication, the right to life, liberty, freedom of speech and expression is meaningless.It attempts to keep track of traditional media, offline media and digital media that faces the onslaught of monopolistic tendencies and is wary of localisation of media. It is part of Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties (CFCL) For Details: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mediavigil/info

Note:Media is over reacting because there is a "structural compulsion for them to lie." There is camera evidence that when Arvind Kejriwal threatened media persons indulging in embedded journalism at the fundraiser in Nagpur, those who were attending paying Rs 10,000/plate applauded. Journalists are cog in the wheel. The jail is a threat for the business enterprise which are using journalists like mercenaries to shoot their rivals.

Gopal Krishna Why over-react to Kejriwal's criticism, ask journalists

Eminent journalists on Saturday questioned the media reaction to
criticism by the Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal. Of the view
that the media should be open to criticism that is “legitimate and long
overdue,” Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Ltd. and publisher of The Hindu N. Ram said: “the hype and overreaction makes us look like a laughing stock.”

He was speaking at a panel discussion on ‘The State of the Media Today’
after the release of journalist Sashi Kumar’s book Unmediate: Essays on
Media, Culture, Cinema here.

Echoing similar views, Mr. Kumar said when Mr. Kejriwal criticises the
media, he does so with the knowledge that there is antagonism within the
public towards the media.

“Unfortunately when people outside the media criticise us, we have a
very thin skin,”' Mr. Ram said, identifying hyper-commercialisation and
trivialisation as some of the ills plaguing the media, apart from the
rogue tendencies that Mr. Kejriwal spoke about. Stating that it was time
to look at the vices that have crept into journalism and not just
celebrate the growth of the media, Mr. Ram wondered whether the
phenomenon of “paid news” was confined to election season.

Maintaining that everything had become “momentous and momentary” for the
media without any contextualisation, National Affairs Editor of The
Telegraph Manini Chatterjee questioned the latest trend of television
channels using feed provided by the BJP and the Congress of their
rallies without sending correspondents to the field.

“If Mamata Banerjee had provided that kind of feed to channels of her
Delhi rally, people would not have known that only 2,000 people turned
up,” she said dwelling on the way the media was manufacturing a
“reality”' and then using it to generate a discourse.

Mr. Kumar lamented that objectivity appeared to have become redundant in
journalism; “subjectivity is masquerading as objective.” While TRPs
were driving the visual media, the print medium was allowing television
to set the agenda, he added. This phenomenon was summed up by economist
Prabhat Patnaik as “tyranny of the discourse.”

With the panellists painting a bleak picture of the media, members of
the audience questioned their failure to provide solutions and pointed
out that self-regulation had obviously failed. “We are being told
nothing has happened in 60 years in this country. Whole past has been
demolished,” pointed out Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of
Technology, Delhi, wondering why newspapers and magazines were not
challenging the lies peddled by some media houses.

Replying to the point made by an oncologist about the absence of
solutions, Mr. Ram said: “There is no easy solution, any more than we
have for curing cancer.” Calling for professionalism and codification of
values and practices, he conceded that self-regulation was not working
within the visual media. The Press Council was not only a toothless body
but was also infested with representatives from the newspaper industry.
“There is a need to have something radically different.”

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